On the 14th of April the Tate Gallery in London opens a major retrospective of the work of Catalan surrealist painter Joan Miró. More than 150 paintings, drawings, sculptures and prints spanning across the six decades of his prolific career have been gathered together by the Tate.
The exhibition showcases many of his major works, many of which are on loan from the Fundació Miró on Montjuic in Barcelona.
The Tate exhibition sets out to show that the playful innocence of his milieu hides a far deeper concern for humanity and a sense of personal and national identity.
A Catalan and native son of Barcelona, Miró remained a symbol of international culture under Franco’s brutal dictatorship, in which the region of Catalunya suffered intense repression. His grand abstract paintings of the late 1960s and early 1970s became a mark of resistance and integrity in the dying years of the regime.
The Tate exhibition will inevitably lead many people to Barcelona to follow up on the discovery of Miró, whose presence can be felt everywhere in the city. No better starting point can be found that the eponymous Miró Foundation on Montjuic. Its white minimalist white structure smacks of Le Corbusier but was in fact designed by Catalan architect Josep Lluis Sert especially for the purpose of housing the most important collection of Miró’s work.
Take a walk along Las Ramblas and you will soon stumble across a mosaic laid on the street with a familiar loose black outline delineating blots of primary colour: blue. Red and yellow. Or try the Park Miró in the Eixample where you can see his Dona I Ocell (Lady and Bird) sculpture pointing skyward.
If you are interested in Miró then apart from the upcoming exibition at the Tate in London you can do no better than come to Barcelona